Jason Silva does it again. The latest episode in his “Shots of Awe” series considers psychedelics as “technologies of ecstasy.” In the short clip, he blows your mind while elaborating on the thoughts of Mircea Eliade, Erik Davis, and others: [Psychedelics are] mankind’s cognitive toolkit, agents of psychic transformation we’ve been engaging in for tens of thousands of years to transform the perceptions of the bodymind, hacking our awareness and our perceptions, that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in a way, all we have and all we are. He goes on to describe the importance of shamanism in human culture: “That has always been the role of the shaman, to unplug us and to show us a bigger, wider, more far-reaching universe that goes beyond what the eye can see.” Check it out, it’ll only take two minutes! Or four, if you immediately watch it again like I did. A few clarifications. Silva cites religious scholar Mircea Eliade’s classic 1951 text, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, but in that book Eliade actually dismisses drug use as a modern corruption of shamanic traditions: Narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for “pure” trance. …The use of intoxicants (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) is […]
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